December 12, 2010, 5:01AM

December 05, 2010, 5:01AM

A recent survey found that one out of five Americans teenage or older want an iPad. No wonder Apple is selling three million iPads a month. It's the fastest-selling single product in the history of consumer electronics. Most buyers are choosing an iPad as a supplement to their current computers -- for watching movies in bed, like I do,... Full story »

November 28, 2010, 5:01AM

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt OUTLOOK, the heavy-duty e-mail, calendar and scheduling software for Windows, comes to the Mac in Office 2011. Itâs ideal if you need to integrate your Mac with a Microsoft Exchange server. Microsoft was the first company to make software especially for Apple's Mac computers. Few Windows users realize that one of the mainstays of... Full story »

November 21, 2010, 5:02AM

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt ÂSPEED TEST SITE shows very high download speed, just below the advertised level, using Verizonâs top-tier FiOS. Upload speed usually tested a little lower than claimed, as shown here. Verizon is one of the big players in the Internet Service market in Central New York, competing in many localities against Time Warner's Road Runner... Full story »

November 14, 2010, 5:01AM

Courtesy of Al Fasoldt DESKTOP COMPUTER? No, this is the authorâs iPad snuggled into Appleâs iPad Keyboard Dock. The external keyboard can be detached in seconds. The iPad has an on-screen keyboard also, in two different sizes. Apple didn't just invent the iPad. It came up with an entirely new ecosystem -- a new way to use an Internet-connected electronic... Full story »

November 07, 2010, 5:01AM

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt APPLEÃ¢ÂÂS NEW iPad, no bigger (and no thicker) than a single copy of National Geographic, can do desktop publishing as well as any full-size computer. Here, using Pages, AppleÃ¢ÂÂs publishing-and-word-processing app, the author has made a party thank-you note. The photo, taken at the party and loaded into the iPad, was inserted with two... Full story »

October 31, 2010, 5:03AM

Courtesy of Al Fasoldt ADOBE LIGHTROOM is showing an extreme enlargement of part of a photo taken by the Lumix camera. The actual area of the enlargement can be seen by the white guide box over a tiny part of the image at upper left. The entire image is 4,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels. I didn't need another new... Full story »

October 17, 2010, 5:02AM

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt WINDOWS ON A MAC? Thatâs what you can see on the authorâs MacBook Pro laptop. Windows 7 is running in a large window on the Mac, and on the Windows desktop are a utility program and Google Chrome, showing a busy Syracuse.com page. At the right, on the Macâs own desktop, are... Full story »

October 10, 2010, 5:01AM

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt INTERNET EXPLORER 9, shown filling most of the screen on a Windows 7 desktop, has no menu bar to clutter up the top of its window. A tab bar is the only feature at the top. Menus pop out when you click a button. Microsoft is batting 1,000 lately. First it hit a home... Full story »

September 26, 2010, 5:02AM

When you want to call your friend, you punch in a telephone number. That's the way it's got to be. Right? Not so right. Telephone numbers are about to go away. Not all at once. But they've had their time in the sun. Who says so? Apple. No, I haven't been kidnapped by a bunch of Apple fanboys and... Full story »

September 19, 2010, 5:01AM

If you've watched a video on YouTube or any other video-sharing site, you've used Flash. It's a cool way to show movie clips and other animations on your computer. But Adobe, the company behind Flash, built a not-so-cool tracking mechanism into Flash that can be used to keep tabs on what you do on the Web. It's bad news... Full story »

September 12, 2010, 5:05AM

Here are 10 more free programs suggested by readers who were responding to my series called "Stop Paying for Software." (You'll find all the columns in the series at www.technofileonline.com/recent.html.) All of these are free. If you get confused by any of the sites and find a come-on for software that costs you money, don't fall for it.... Full story »

September 05, 2010, 5:00AM

Intuit's Quicken financial software is highly regarded and widely used -- by the Windows crowd. Unfortunately, Intuit botched the Mac version of Quicken by taking away some of the most important features of the Windows program. This is a serious problem for former Windows users who switched recently to the Mac. Sales to "switchers" are a significant percentage of... Full story »

August 29, 2010, 5:02AM

I baby my Windows PC. I run fix-up software every chance I get. I clean out excess files every day. I repair the Registry every time I have 15 minutes to spare. I do this because Windows is fragile. It can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Don't misunderstand me. I like Windows a lot. I especially... Full story »

August 22, 2010, 5:02AM

If you have a pint-size netbook computer, chances are it's got an equally tiny battery -- one that runs dry after two hours or less. My little Acer Aspire is a case in point. I loved everything about it except its toy-size power plant. Until I gave it some electronic steroids, my Acer would run out of breath before... Full story »

August 01, 2010, 5:03AM

Shopping for a laptop computer for a college student? My recommendation is Apple's MacBook. The MacBook has a huge advantage over any Windows laptop: It's immune to the more than 1 million viruses and uncountable spyware infections that plague Windows PCs. And the MacBook, like all Macs, comes with the kind of multimedia software that warms a student's heart... Full story »

July 25, 2010, 5:05AM

The folks at Time Warner were understandably concerned when I reported my findings on the speed of the company's new Wideband Internet service. (The article ran in early June. You can find it at www.technofileonline. com/texts/tec060610.html.) My tests showed much lower speed than Time Warner advertises for Wideband. Rather than the rated speed of 50 megabits per second (mbs),... Full story »

July 11, 2010, 5:00AM

I'm often asked how to make digital audio files -- for those who want to create audio CDs or MP3s -- out of old phonograph records. There are two ways, not one. Here's the fast way. You play the phonograph record on any old record player and send the audio signals to your computer. At the computer, you use... Full story »

July 04, 2010, 5:05AM

Happy Birthday, America! This is a great day for picnics and fireworks, and not a great day for stuff you have to study and learn. So let's list 10 ways to rescue yourself from sticky situations. 1. Your computer won't turn off. Don't laugh. It happens. But it's easy to get out of this mess. Just hold down the... Full story »

June 20, 2010, 5:00AM

Photoshop, the professional image-editing software from Adobe, is celebrating its 20th birthday this year. Since the first version of Photoshop in 1990, Adobe has come up with 11 successive versions, each more powerful than the previous one. But the latest version, called Photoshop CS5 ("Creative Suite version 5"), is not simply more powerful. It adds an almost magical blemish-elimination... Full story »